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SPX Virtual Email Appliance on Hyper-V

**Sophos don't support Hyper-V at time of writing, so any issues and you're on your own and I take no liability/warranty on this.**

For those who require to run Sophos SPX Virtual Email Appliance on Microsoft Hyper-V platform can do so very easily.

1) Download ESXi 4.1 images of the virtual appliance from Sophos trial section or if you have a live Virtual appliance(s) running then export those as .vmdk

2) On any windows machine, install XenConvert. I did this on a 2k8 R2 Enterprise box using the 64 bit version.

3) Run XenConvert

4) Select convert from "VMWare Virtual Hard Disk (VMDK)"

5) Select convert to "XenServer Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)" - Ignore it says XenServer

6) Select both of the Sophos VMDK files (Base and Opt). You'll have to run through the process twice as you can only do one file at a time.

7) You may receive errors during the process - ignore them

8) Build a new Hyper-V machine

9) Add 2 IDE controllers - first as the base.vhd and second as the opt.vhd

10) Remove the network card and add a legacy one instead.

Notes:

Hyper-V may assign the VHDs as Dynamic disks, for performance I suggest converting them to fixed size.

Assign 4 CPUs rather than the default 1.

If the appliance hangs on the white screen of Sophos booting then the opt.vhd file hasn't converted correctly or not present.

:25979


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  • More than happy to answer questions on this.

    To start with Sophos are planning to support Hyper-V next year, Q1 hopefully, it maybe worth holding out till then unless you have to install on Hyper-V asap - like we did.

    We've been running the system for the last couple weeks, very stable.

    We've allocated 2gb to start with but have increased it to 3gb, no real reason other than simply there should the appliance need it - the host has 72gb so doesnt make much difference for us.

    We have put a dedicated NIC in the physical that only this appliance uses. Whilst I believe it would be absolutely fine sharing a NIC, we didn't want to take any chances seeing this is unsupported.

    It turns over approximately 200 emails on a day to day basis and blocks over a 1000 spam connections, again on a daily basis. The system will be more heavily used in the next few months as we'll expand from 40 users to 100, maybe more.

    We have noticed the time in which an encrypted email is generated and sent to the receipient can be slow. Sometimes its near instant and others can take upto 15 minutes. At this stage I have not looked into the matter further so it could be an appliance setting rather than a conflict/issue with Hyper-V. This could be an issue though as the company wishes to encrypt every email leaving the network so the overhead is going to greatly increase very soon. On the other hand I do wonder whether the backoff timers are to blame.

    Just to add the virtual machine is on a 6 disk, 10k rpm Raid 10 config and not noticed any performance issues.

    :26111
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  • More than happy to answer questions on this.

    To start with Sophos are planning to support Hyper-V next year, Q1 hopefully, it maybe worth holding out till then unless you have to install on Hyper-V asap - like we did.

    We've been running the system for the last couple weeks, very stable.

    We've allocated 2gb to start with but have increased it to 3gb, no real reason other than simply there should the appliance need it - the host has 72gb so doesnt make much difference for us.

    We have put a dedicated NIC in the physical that only this appliance uses. Whilst I believe it would be absolutely fine sharing a NIC, we didn't want to take any chances seeing this is unsupported.

    It turns over approximately 200 emails on a day to day basis and blocks over a 1000 spam connections, again on a daily basis. The system will be more heavily used in the next few months as we'll expand from 40 users to 100, maybe more.

    We have noticed the time in which an encrypted email is generated and sent to the receipient can be slow. Sometimes its near instant and others can take upto 15 minutes. At this stage I have not looked into the matter further so it could be an appliance setting rather than a conflict/issue with Hyper-V. This could be an issue though as the company wishes to encrypt every email leaving the network so the overhead is going to greatly increase very soon. On the other hand I do wonder whether the backoff timers are to blame.

    Just to add the virtual machine is on a 6 disk, 10k rpm Raid 10 config and not noticed any performance issues.

    :26111
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